Slashdot Mirror
White House Says Hard Drives Were Destroyed
wanderindiana brings us an update on the White House missing emails mess, which we have discussed before. It seems the hard drives of many White House computers are gone beyond the possibility of recovery. Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy? "Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed."
What did they do with the harddrives? And why aren't there any backups? The IT staff either is malicious or highly incompetent.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
If they are arrested now, they can (and likely would be) pardoned.
Much better to wait a year, when a new administration is in office, and then go after the lawbreakers.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I would certainly hope that any Whitehouse hard drive that is decommissioned is utterly destroyed.
The real question is why secure backups of email aren't part of the IT infrastructure.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
This is the US you're talking about. I'm not trolling but I've been surprised by the lack of protests and resignations over such failed policy. A war based on false information, falling dollar, weakening economy, information getting destroyed, Katrina, etc. In old Europe, where I am from, governments would resign and write out new elections after such disastrous events. If they don't write out new elections they would be forced by countless protests from the public. In the US however people seem to fear being questioned about their patriotism when they publicly protest their government.
Here's the problem: The people who would be doing the prosecuting are the very same people who told the guy to press the button.
We're unfortunately in a bit of a bind. The branch of government designated to enforce our laws has no regard for them, and the only other branch of government that could do something about it is too spineless and fractured by party politics to lift a finger.
The current administration is trying real hard to out-do Nixon as the most criminal Presidency in our nation's history, and if anyone were to actually do some investigation into it, we may even find that it has been a success.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"millions of missing emails"
My believability barrier just snapped.
I believe the word "criminal" is all to apt for this administration.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
There is a law related to the preservation of all presidential records, however, that should supercede any 'standard' policy. For more information, search for "Presidential Records Act."
This offered excuse does not hold water and should finally put an end to the question about whether or not to prosecute the executive. This is no simple 'mistake.' It was willful and intentional destruction of evidence. And let us not lose sight over what this ultimately comes down to. If you consider yourself to be a patriotic citizen of the U.S., you should be outraged and infuriated at the thousands of U.S. lives wasted at the hands on this administration brought on by an illegal and deceitfully based war. It is no trivial matter to send even a single soldier to face his or her death. And it is certainly no trivial matter when even a single person dies because this president has lied to congress and entered us into a war. Forget that this war has harmed the global economy and the U.S.'s standing in the world and all other fall-out.
If there were justice to be had, it would be in the form of "demoting" our commander-in-chief down to a foot-soldier, put a rifle in his hand and let HIM fight his damned war in person.
Except when there is explicit law to the contrary.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
So at what point does the silliness of excuses stop and we start calling "destruction of evidence"?
When the next administration need something to distract the public from their own nefarious deeds.
National Security supersedes the Presidential Records Act. There was likely e-mail on those drives that could've had a massive negative effect on the President and his administration, thus it is in our national security interests to see that those records were destroyed.
Given the amount of security-sensitive or financially-sensitive documentation on the computers, OF COURSE they should be destroyed, or else wiped beyond recovery.
Read your regulations. HIPPA (medical record) regulations alone require the destruction of any data like that using national-security level tools. Either you break the drive itself, you push it through one hell of a magnetic field a certain number of times, or you use one hell of an overwriting tool that makes 16+ passes on the drive to ensure that traces of previous data are completely gone.
This is a non-story, and the only reason it's being pushed time and again is as a kludge to try to attack Bush. I'll admit there are a hell of a lot of reasons to attack Bush (the bribery and scams over illegal immigration/amnesty alone!), but this one isn't it.
Look, the DOJ will not investigate as they are republicans (total corruption within the party), so it is up to dems to do this. If they really wanted to investigate, they would call in Sibel Edmunds and put her before the senate or the house or both. But ALL of congress is trying to keep this quiet. Waxman and Clinton PROMISED her that if the dems took control of congress that they would help her. They lied (IMHO, this is why clinton is the weakest of the 3 candidates ). Apparently a number of dems promised her that. ALL OF THEM LIED. NONE HAVE DONE A DAMN THING. This shows that because we have allowed laws that pretty much limit this to a 2 party system, that nothing will happen. Currently, I do not see the dems as being as corrupt as the pubs. But the fact that they are giving a sham investigation into this WH's doings, says that they are wanting a "get out of jail free" card for future use. So, yeah, the old timer dems are not that much different than all the republicans.
Is it any wonder that Americans are picking up on a man who says that he will change things while the old timer dems and nearly all of the pub party dislike him.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nixon tried that argument, too.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
The other end of the trade show there was a company showing containers of metal shards. They had a shredder for disk drives. They have security clearances that allow them to shred drives with classified data. I have no direct knowledge of the drive disposal policy at the EOP, but I would expect that the NSA would require this as a matter of course. It is smart IT management.
But the argument over the drives is somewhat irrelevant as we know for a fact that members of the administration were using the RNC mail servers to transact government business, specifically to avoid leaving a paper trail. In the process they directed emails containing the most secret, most confidential government discussions through the machines of a small company that has no security clearance, does not even have a security policy and used the same network resources and mail servers for other customers.
The company concerned received the contract for the 2004 RNC convention. They would therefore have been an espionage target in any case. I would think that it is almost certain that multiple foreign powers have copies of the emails. Why don't we just call up the Iranian embassy and ask them nicely if they will share?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The 1978 Presidential Records Act expressly forbids it. In fact this admission that they intentionally destroyed hard drives just adds to the evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the current administration. These crooks were also using Republican National Committee servers to conduct official Whitehouse business in order to skirt the record keeping requirements of the act. http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/03/white_house_emails.html
But the congress is gonna let them slide again, when they should impeach the bastards.
-- QED
I'm fairly sure that a lot of damaging info to the current administration would be found on those drives.
Privacy for ordinary citizens is a right, but our officials that WE ELECT, their job is our business and we should have the right to know what they do. If they've done nothing wrong, then why hide anything. This does not apply to citizens on ordinary, routine matters e.g. we should not have to voluntarily have our cars searched cause we're innocent.
We elect our officials - they work for us, and therefore need to have accountability.
..........FULL STOP.
The reason that this is a huge issue is that the destruction of presidential records is illegal. The Presidential Records Act mandates that all records from the President and Vice President are owned by the public, and that the President is not allowed to destroy any records without specific authorization from the Archivist of the United States stating that the records do not have any historical, informational, or evidentiary value.
There is a great desire on the part of many Americans to impeach Bush for his part in prosecuting the disastrous $2 Trillion+ debacle, the Iraq War, which is currently sinking our economy. Nixon wss easy to impeach because he left a lot of evidence in the form of tapes for his prosecution, but Bush and Cheney are not making that mistake -- they have both had very "convenient" situations where their records regarding among other things the Iraq War planning that have been "accidentally" destroyed.
If the American people were to have more evidence about White House activities, there would be many more people joining Scooter Libby in jail, and we would find out more about things like "ex" gay prostitute Jeff Gannon's entries and exits at the White House .